Small Ponds [Development Strategy]

Bright lights, big city. Developing for a hit platform often feels a bit like being a young ingénue getting on the bus to New York City in hope of becoming a Broadway star. There are huge opportunities, but also massive competition, so for every star who makes it there are a thousand who don’t.

Often the smart move is to start somewhere quieter. The actress who starts in smaller venues learning her trade and developing a following has more chance of making it than the ingénue off the bus, and similarly in games the developer who focuses on a quiet platform can often achieve something much more sustainable.

Big Ponds

For many developers, it’s not about the money. They just have ideas for games, want to develop them and want to be able to make enough from then so that they can live reasonably while continuing to do the thing that they love. Who can fault that?

There is nothing wrong with that sense of purpose but there is something wrong with thinking that’s all there is to it. Knowing how to find your audience and build something for them that matters is a job of two parts. Your purpose is a marketing story, one of the best kinds in fact, but when standing alongside 10,000 other people telling similar stories it can easily become background noise.

In those circumstances the finding-your-audience part can be much harder than it appears. The little fish causes very few ripples in comparison to the big fish, so it’s not just the game you make or the way you make it that matters. Where you make it can be just as vital. There are several templates to choose from.

Launch Titles

Launch titles are games that appear on a platform when it is very young, the catalogue is limited, and the audience therefore has much less choice. In those circumstances you can go very far with very little. Release within the first 12 months or so of a platform’s life and this puts you in a good position.

Many Facebook apps managed to make a splash back when the platform was first launched even though they were mostly terribly broken software. WipeOut, Die Hard Trilogy and Tekken all benefited massively from being launch PlayStation titles because the PlayStation was a hot platform, consumers wanted it, and the selection of games was limited. Two of those went on to become franchises that we still have to this day.

It is very hard to be a launch title on a closed platform. New Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft consoles tend to be wrapped up in partnerships with publishers. When Nintendo launched the 3DS earlier this year, they did so with the help of a number of partner publishers producing games that were part of long-running franchises.

Arguably this had a negative effect on early sales of the 3DS (that and the high price) because the software lacked a breakout launch hit. Nonetheless, Microsoft and Sony behave the same way. They do eventually open the doors to more innovative content, but they like to work initially with the people that they know have the technical depth to deliver.

We live in an era of multiplying platforms, however, so those are not your only options. There is the oncoming storm of Android tablets, and perhaps the possibility to negotiate an exclusivity deal with a particular vendor like HTC. There is the Windows 7 Phone. There is Google+. The Amazon App Store. Who knows what the eventual fates of these and many other platforms will be, but each has an audience which wants to play some games.

Chasm Apps

Angry Birds wasn’t a launch title, and nor was Final Fantasy VII. They were games that came out at the moment when their chosen platform crossed the chasm, going from the platform that those in the know wanted to the platform that absolutely everyone wanted.

Games that manage to get into this position still have enough of the limited choice advantages that launch titles have because most of their competitors are waiting for the platform to cross the chasm before they’ll develop for it. The early birds (or the angry birds even) therefore get the worm.

Of course, this is incredibly hard to do because timing is everything. There is a window of opportunity for all platforms that manage to cross the chasm, perhaps 12 months after the launch period, and enough breadth in most platforms for perhaps 10 games to benefit from this effect before it becomes too clogged.

On Facebook, that was the year that started with Restaurant City, went through FarmVille and ended with Happy Aquarium. After that the platform changed to constrain some of the viral activity, each of the big games raised their developers up to big successes, and so they largely remain. It’s not impossible (wooga for example) to still make that dent, just harder.

Chasm apps attract a disproportionate amount of attention, which exerts a downward pressure. The ‘Why is Angry Birds always Number 1?’ effect is because your average mainstream customer is not so engaged as to go digging deeply in app selections to find something interesting. Meanwhile your early adopter customer is often bored of the platform and wants to move on.

Between launch and chasm apps, most platforms get to a point where there are 15-20 key franchises that effectively define them, they are the ones that win and everything else is shut out unless it’s truly remarkable, a bar which keeps raising.

If it happens for you that you get to be the next Rovio, go forth and conquer the world. If not, however, consider that playing in Rovio’s pond is harder for you because Rovio is already there. It’s harder to avoid invisibility, harder to get covered by the technology or cultural media, and harder to build a presence. Not impossible, just harder.

Niche Platforms

There are many more platforms that fall into the niche category than there are hitmakers. Everything from interaction television games, Blackberry apps, Mac games, the Chrome web store or Hi5 is a niche platform. They are usually underserved, quiet places where there may be plenty of audience but no buzz. They are the sorts of platforms where you are unlikely to every make colossal sales, but if you’re canny you might well be able to do something exciting in that others have not.

However this is not all plain sailing. Niche platforms are usually niche for a reason. They might have a limited API, a lack of developer support, a maddening set of restrictive platform policies or a not-straightforward route to market. There may be a lot of negotiation with the platform holder involved. And they may have a limited technology base.

I, for example, was the senior game development manager at BSkyB, responsible for commissioning games for set top boxes in the UK. This was not a business that could reach millions of customers, it couldn’t command high budgets, nor was it the easiest platform in the world to work with. The content strategy was more dictated than meritocratic, heavily focused on licensed content, and had an unusual business model that ruled out many otherwise good ideas. Plus using a TV remote control as a gaming device is not exactly ideal.

Nonetheless, several developers worked on our platform for years. They made lots of games, some of them original. They had engine strategies, tool chains and they created stable – though not spectacular – businesses from those roots. This enabled them to earn decent revenue and - in at least one case – explore innovative ideas elsewhere in the knowledge that they had a fall-back.

There are lots and lots of similar opportunities available for the company that wants to dig for them, from the world of running fantasy sports games for media sites through to bundling quirky apps with platforms. The business development component of getting into such platforms is usually the biggest obstacle for most small developers, but if you’re willing to be very patient you may well end up making something that works, and who knows.

It might just be the thing that gets you going.

Open Waters

Finally there is your own platform. The one distribution venue that has no masters and seems to continuously bubble up new and interesting things year after year is the open web. Whether that means a game based on HTML5 or a downloadable game (like Minecraft) that sells itself from its own site, the open web is the alpha and the omega.

It has no master. Every other platform that I’ve mentioned above is controlled by someone, has its own ideas on how software distribution should work and what it thinks of its developers. Every one ultimately has to be negotiated with in some shape or form, and each has its rules, restrictions and by-laws. Many have controlled shop fronts (which can be great but also warps on the kinds of games that really make it in their world) and so each is, in its own way, tricky.

The open web has the disadvantage that you need to do a lot more of the heavy lifting of getting your game, distribution and so on sorted out for yourself. On the other hand it is by far the safest model in the long term. If you mean to build a franchise especially, it really is one of the best options – though a lot of hard work, just like any other.